steve (02/16/83)
With respect to Kurt Guntheroth's paranoia about the CDC in Atlanta, it is mostly unfounded. When recombinant DNA research began, all such researchers in the world got together (about 1971 or so) to talk about the dangers. They decided (and later actually did) to use a weakened strain of Escheria Coli for their experimentation. Then everyone in the world voluntarily ceased their research while one installation came up with it. Now everyone uses it. Among its other problems, it is killed by direct sunlight in a short time (unlike natural E. Coli), it requires several very obscure chemicals (not available in nature) or it cannot live, and so on. It took 18 months of long hard work to mutate E. Coli into this weakened state, and the possibility of a sufficient number of mutations occurring in the few hours that they would survive in case of accidental release to keep some alive (with possibly harmful genes within) is vanishingly small. Dig it - Biological engineers don't want to die any more than you do, and they work with the stuff directly! After this proposal by the biologists themselves, several government agencies around the world reviewed the proposals and approved them. While this does not necessarily prove anything, it does tend to help in my mind.
CAD:kalash (02/22/83)
#R:dadla-a:-29600:ucbcad:26000007:000:423 ucbcad!kalash Feb 21 09:51:00 1983 I hate to tell you this, but the biologists don't use the E. Coli cells anymore. I have a friend at UCSF doing all sorts of strange (only sort of comprehensible to me) things to the DNA of a mouse skin cell. She tells me that the biologists figured out that the chance of harmful mutation happening, escaping, and then survivng were vanishingly small (they have a real problem keeping the things alive as it is). Joe